An excellent sunset, somewhere over Texas.
Glowset
Tag: travel
But the Curtain Did Not Rise Again
Spreckels Theater closed in 2020, was sold in 2021, and leaves behind its marquee as a grim and overly optimistic reminder of a different time.
Return Flight, Almost Night
Reflections of sunset light from the engineered surfaces of an aircraft are quite different from the rougher surfaces of buildings and plants at ground level.
San Diego Cyberpunk
This view—past tall metal fences, over bright yellow industrial pipes and through palm trees, would fit well in the cyberpunk environs of Cyberpunk 2077’s Night City. Having not been back for several years, I was as entranced as ever by the strange mishmash that constitutes SoCal.
San Diego Trolley
Sun? Palm trees? Ample public transit? This must be California.
Return Flight, Return Light
Somewhere high above Texas (I’m sure a local could recognize the town from the shape of the river), the sun went down and the lights of the villages turned on.
Resilient Dahl/Miyazaki House
The steep-roofed Belgian structure in the distance (now T’ile Maines) is a relaxing venue on a Belgian island in Mechelen, but a foggy winter evening makes it look more like the sorts of charming/mysterious structures that populate the works of Roald Dahl and Hayao Miyazaki.
Madrid Obligatorio
In December, our transatlantic flight to New York turning back near Greenland, spending hours in the air with an unknown mechanical error for returning us to the Madrid-Barajas Airport. After an all-too-brief but restless night in a mediocre Spanish hotel, we were back at the airport early the next morning for a second (and ultimately successful) attempt at an Atlantic crossing. Several hundred people waited to board. I looked out at the horizon; the landscape was strange, alien, surreal, but ultimately a lot more welcoming than the cold dark of the North Atlantic. The image will stay with me.
Moco Puddle
A muddy but vibrantly colored cafe space outside of the Moco Museum in Amsteram looks a bit like a matte painting for some Miyazaki-esque anime adventure.
Rijksmuseum
Bright sky opens to reveal the sun between the spires of the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam.
Beneath the museum, a long tunnel reminds me of China Miéville’s “The City and the City” and its passages between overlapping worlds.
Peaking through the glass reveals an otherworldly modern interior that perhaps continues that Miéville theme in its own way.
Canal Gossip
Relaxing with in the shade by the canal on a summer afternoon is excellent, but zoom in and you’ll see that this young woman is laughing along with her friend who is almost perfectly hidden behind her.
Amsterdam Aquaculture
The impression of plantlife in every edge of the Netherlands was one I expected to drop away as we entered more urban areas, but the canals of Amsterdam, too, were lined with green.
An Amsterdam Streetcorner
A slice of life on an Amsterdam summer afternoon—café, busy streets, big clouds.
Amsterdam Draw Bridge
This modest iron drawbridge in Amsterdam has a mid-nineteenth-century-ness that fits charmingly among the tall buildings and trees neighboring it.
Boats in Ommen
Though boats are an everyday part of Dutch life, the large fraction of these boats that were occupied by people living and traveling in them (thus not leisure-craft nor houseboats) leads me to believe that I observed the river-and-canal-going equivalent of the caravans also visible at the edges of the image.
Decaseconds 